Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Per my post about Quizzes on my main blog, here's my first attempt at creating a quiz. Trying to rearrange the items to be in a different order each day was a drag, and I don't think this layout is particularly efficient. Will have to give both things greater thought this week.

In the end, I ended up rewriting the items shown below on an index card (see Quizzes) - one for each dog... and I even messed that up the first time I used it (a whole two minutes after I wrote it) and recorded both dogs on the same card.

(sigh)

That said, after just a few quizzes, I'm really pleased with how it's going. I wish the boys were doing better, but I guess that's the whole point of doing it!

Sunday, December 27, 2009

This is the last week before the first of the year and I am pretty happy with the layout of the worksheet now. Not so happy about my following of it. Of course, being the holidays and all, I do have a few excuses to fall back on.

This past week saw me videoing both dogs doing their Level 1 On The Road items for Level Three. They were really, really rusty and their effort was less than stellar. Might try again, we'll see.

Zachary is getting the kinks out of his Front (see One Size Fits All and his latest practice video) and both dogs finished Distance, Stand from Sit, Retrieve, and Scenting with few problems. Beau's Front is coming along nicely, and we are just doing generalization now - mostly which direction I'm facing. Both dogs are getting the hang of Finish (left pivot) and both need work on eye-contact during Heel (right pivot.)

I've been steadily moving my Canine Curriculum for Zachary into PowerPoint so I can create jpegs out of it. Looks much nicer than what had before or what I can create in a post, but it takes a bit of time so stuff will slowly trickle out over the next few weeks.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Made some minor changes from last week. I decided to start the "school week" on Monday, which gives me both Saturday AND Sunday at the end of the week to cram before admitting defeat for the week. Switching the start day also gives me the whole weekend to come up with next weeks items.

The other change was to specifically call out Extracurricular Activities. I was worried the sheet was getting too busy last week, so I left it off, but as it is one of the key elements of his curriculum it seemed... wrong... to leave it off so I went ahead and gave it space this week. We'll see what next week holds. I'd like to have the format reasonably finalized by the first Monday in January.

In general, I think this week has way too much stuff on it for a normal week, but I'm hoping I'll have more free time due to the Holidays. If not, then I'll just blame my family :) and move things over to the first of the year.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Here's my first cut at a template to keep track of what I want to do this week. If you click on it, you'll see a slightly clearer version. I'm thinking I'll keep a printout lying about to motivate (or guilt) me into following it.